I'm not the original complainer about UTF8 support, but "If you want to store it as unicode text feel free to use the ntext and nvarchar types." comes at a price: for the o so common almost-ASCII text collections, it blows up your disk usage and I/O bandwidth for actual data by a factor of almost 2. For shortish fields, the difference probably isn't that, but if you store, say, web pages or blog posts, it can add up.